Evangelize Like Benedict

young people want that they want the real thing and we shouldn't settle for well you're kind of a spiritual person you know keep seeking no no they they want something nourishing and and the benedictines can give it to them welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vot the host and the senior publishing director what can saint benedict a 6th century monk teach us about evangelization today well that's what you'll find out in today's discussion with bishop barron bishop it is good to be with you as always hey brandon how's life in orlando life is very well i want to talk about two really interesting conversations you've you've had one of them was your participation in this event called the big think what was that about oh yeah it's sponsored by the templeton foundation we have a relationship with them now we're doing a number of things with them and uh it it's very good it was very intense about two and a half hour conversation and we talked about as the title suggests a lot of big topics um one was forgiveness the whole theme of forgiveness coming up out of the new testament how that affects our lives today questions of non-violence and justice and all that and then we got deeply into god so they were very interested in in my writings about god and atheism and what the atheists get wrong and how christians understand god the great theological and philosophical tradition around that and then we got into of course the problem of suffering which you almost always do when you talk about god uh we talked about heaven hell we talked about a number of just really big deep ideas and it was good long intense and that'll be coming out i don't know sometime soon we'll definitely have a link to that when that comes out another great conversation you had was as a part of our bishop aaron presents series which we're ramping back up this is where we bring you know cultural influencers and thinkers and authors and movers and shakers to santa barbara to have a long conversation with you and you recently had the author of the book strange rights her name is tara isabella burton we actually did a word on fire show discussion about this book a few months back uh how did that discussion go it was great she came in here and you'll see now with season two we have a new um kind of set with a table is the first time we did around the table and i was delighted with the conversation as you say i like that book a lot and i think it's very interesting as as i said to her at the end of the conversation to me it was very hopeful book at the end of the day because she shows that even among the nuns you don't have a simply a barren atheistic sort of landscape you've got a pretty richly textured religious landscape for one of a better term meaning people are reaching out to the ultimate the transcendent along all kinds of different paths and uh so it might look like just a ferrago of wild crazy uh ideas but i think she sees in it and i agree with her there's some ground for hope there so look forward to watching that conversation well i want to shift our attention back to the great saint benedict you've had a lot of benedictine things going on in your life lately you recently gave a little retreat to a bunch of benedictine abbotts from around the country and you're also i think pretty soon in a couple weeks here uh giving the commencement address at the great benedictine college in atchison kansas we'll we'll talk about that after it happens um but i want to talk about this this message you gave to the benedictine abbots you were looking at various aspects of the benedictine life that are important for the re-evangelization of society and i thought it was so good and also applicable not just to benedictine habits but to catholics everywhere these evangelistic principles we can pull from the life and work of saint benedict so let's begin briefly maybe by exploring your own history with the benedictines i i believe that attraction began early right um when you were a teenager you read the memoir of the great uh trappist thomas merton but talk about the origins of your familiarity with benedictine spirituality that's probably the beginning of it right which i've talked about many times when i read the seven story mountain and you know of course as a trappist merton belonged to the reform of the cistercian order and the cistercian order was a reform of primitive benedictinism and so merton's world is basically a benedictine world the second connection was you know as a high school freshman i was with the dominicans at fenwick high school and i really got my vocation from them because i first heard about thomas aquinas but then after my first year for a variety of reasons i went to another high school called bennett academy and that was associated with the benedictine abbey and lyle illinois so right away i was then in the presence of a lot of benedictine monks and i remember the liturgies out there on sunday i was invited to serve sometimes it was a great kind of privilege to be able to serve that mass and i i loved it i found it very moving and then maybe the most powerful in a way it was right before my priestly ordination so we're in the spring of 1986 and i am going on my pre-ordination retreat and i went with a buddy of mine who had gone to school there at saint meinward abbey which is in far southern indiana and meinritt had a had and has a large community of monks and they're really known for their liturgy and especially their sung office well it's burned in my memory it was my first morning there we had arrived at night i had never been there before i was staying in a guest house someplace and i had to make my way very early of course to the church and i got up i think i overslept and i was a little bit late and i made my way through i can still see it in my mind's eye a very misty sort of morning and i made my way up to the side door of the church and i opened it up and suddenly there was this warm golden light coming from the church and the voices of the monks i walked right into one of their psalms and to hear not on a record you know like oh that's listen to these monks you know from europe or something but right in the heartland of america my own country to hear this gorgeous chant of the psalms and it just it kind of electrified me i must say and i've never this is in a good way i've never gotten over it i from that moment on just been very taken with the benedictine manner of life and style of prayer and then much of my life brandon up until recent years because now as a bishop i go with my brother bishops on retreat but almost every year of my priesthood when i went on my yearly retreat i would go to a benedictine house somewhere and that was true in our country whether it's it's um st procopius abbey whether it's marmie and abby whether it's mine red i went many times on retreat when i was in europe uh as a student i went to tamiya i went to salem i went to sito itself the the mother house of the cistercian order i went on retreat to these benedictine places so i've always had this kind of romantic you might call it romantic sense of of the beauty of the benedictine life which is the main reason why i told the abbots you refer to this this retreat i gave basically to the benedict and abbotts of america down in they gathered in new orleans and st joseph abbey i told them one reason i was attracted to that invitation was it had to do with two things i love one evangelization and two benedictinism and so the talk was trying to think those two things together over the years you've spoken to groups representing many religious orders when you do you often encourage them to be boldly themselves so the franciscans you tell them you need to be the great proponents of francis and bonaventure and don scotus and dominicans you need to represent aquinas and dominic you said the same thing to the benedictines you said be benedictines but this might be somewhat controversial i want you to talk about it you said do not become parish priests be benedictines what did you mean by that yeah and i i explained to them look i've known a lot of benedictines over the years who do staff parishes and and function as parish priests and i nothing essentially against that i mean sometimes there's a real need and and and abby can serve that but i said what i don't like is when i've heard this from some benedictines over the years you know i didn't really know what it meant to be a priest until i was doing parish work well look i'm i'm a diocesan bishop i know all about parish work i i respect it i admire it i supervise 40 paris i have nothing against it but i said i always kind of balk at that because benedictines should say no look i i totally get what it means to be a priest precisely as a benedictine as a monk as someone dedicated to the aura libora of the monastery and don't i said to them fall into the trap i think of so valorizing or so romanticizing parish work as though that's what it really means to be a priest i think by being great monks they can be of evangelical power and they don't have to transform themselves into diocesan priests in order to reach the people be monks be monks with all that that means i said and i think you'll evangelize even more effectively let's turn now to several principles of the benedictine life that are potent for evangelization and again i think these are applicable and valuable not just to monks but to lay people anyone working in the field of evangelization the first principle is humility saint benedict speaks about humility often and his rule what's his insight about this virtue and why is humility necessary for evangelization well right benedict says that the monastery should be a school of the virtues it's beautiful description a place where we learn the great virtues of the moral life and the spiritual life but what's the most important virtue no question about it in benedict's mind it's humility he gives us 12 degrees of humility spends an awful lot of time on it i think brandon i told the abbotts this is though they need to hear it from me i mean they know it it's related to the opening word of the rule which is obscure listen listen you know hear o israel the lord your god is lord alone faith fit as exoditu paul says faith comes from hearing listen the person of faith listens to a higher voice a voice beyond his own voice beyond the voices of those around him and the culture he he listens tends to the higher voice and that is humility it seems to me the prideful person says it's my voice that matters right it's my plans my project i'm in charge here the humble person sets that aside sets his own will aside and listens to the voice of god and subjects himself to the will of god so that's at the very heart of the monastic life it's the heart ultimately of the spiritual life and it's what an evangelized person looks like right if you've been evangelized you've heard the good news mind you you've heard it faith comes from hearing it's been preached to you the good news about jesus and now you know well my life isn't about me it's about him he's the risen lord and so humility is deeply related to evangelization because the prideful person can't really be evangelized so i was saying how the monastery should become a school a particularly of this virtue that people would meet these monks who have dedicated their lives to listening to the higher voice um that has enormous evangelical power another benedictine principle you highlighted was justice under this umbrella of justice you included uh the common good care for the poor um to a society so often predicated on buying and selling and owning how can the benedicting stress on poverty and the common good generate real evangelical power i said to the to the abbots it's related to john paul ii that uh key to the new evangelization is the church's social teaching and i think that's really a very legitimate instinct um we will evangelize when people see this kind of radical way that we live so it's nothing against the market economy the church favors the market economy but a market economy that is is circumscribed legally and morally by all sorts of restrictions because it's meant to push us in the direction of of love right everything comes under the aegis of love including and especially our economic life now take a further step are there some people who are called not not everybody certainly but are some people called to a hyper radicalized version of this yes namely those who say i'm surrendering any claim to private property i'm i'm giving what i have to the community there's nothing that i own everything is owned in common for the common good well that's what you see in a monastic context benedict is very strong on this that this he calls it this this evil of private property and again he means in the monastic setting so we're not talking about communism here on the grand scale you know that the evil of private property this is mine right that must be eradicated from the monastery so in the very radicality of this form of life we're meant to see something new something different something that gets our attention right and maybe shocks us out of our self-preoccupation our obsession with what's mine and and building up wealth and riches i remember one of the abbots we had a conversation afterwards and he goes well we're not recommending objection and that's true like you're not saying i will only be a monk if i live in abject you know poverty no no it's this keen sense of the common good that whatever i have is for the sake of of the whole i think that has enormous evangelical power when people come and they see they see this radical form of life i think i reminded them too of the great cardinal george remarked about pacifism i think we've talked about it where the cardinals said look i'm glad there are some pacifists in the church because in their radicality they remind us of what life in heaven will be like right when we put away our swords and put away all violence but he also added i'm glad not everyone in this world is a pacifist but there are some just as i'm glad there are some celibates in this world who remind us of the way we will love in heaven but i'm glad not everyone's a celibate so i'd say in a similar way i'm glad there are some people that live this really radical form of the common good that they surrender private property now follow cardinal george i'm glad not everyone lives that way not everyone's called to that but the monks are and they're meant to wake us up to to the a new possibility let's look at another key benedictine principle and that's the cultivation of beauty um you said and i'm quoting you here benedictine houses are usually in beautiful places and marked by beautiful art and architecture this is not insignificant evangelically speaking why is that so absolutely yeah and you know it's funny brandon maybe the one exception i can think of it in all my wanderings around the benedictine world might be sito itself you know the cistercians are known for their kind of austerity and sito the where bernard and company you know founded the cistercians is in a just very kind of flat country it's near dijon in france the building the church building itself is not very remarkable there's not a lot of artwork but that's kind of a the exception that proves the rule otherwise gosh everywhere i've gone in the benedictine world you know incidental and tommy a and then you go to san anselmo and rome and they're beautiful they're beautiful locations they're beautiful buildings and architecture as we've often said of the transcendentals the good the true and the beautiful maybe the beautiful is the is the least um threatening just look like if there's a non-believer who's maybe vaguely interested in in the faith and and maybe they're not real argumentative they're not intellectual types maybe just just bring them to a monastery just show them look at this place and then then bring them in as i had that experience long ago just to come into the church beautifully appointed church while the monks are singing the psalms there's an alchemy there something's going to happen to you something will change in you just watch participate in the beauty of the liturgy you know i i go back brandon in my mind to that story about james joyce you know born and raised an uber catholic but then you know he falls out with the church and has this really ambiguous relationship with the church but yet they say joyce as an old man would slip into churches in france or switzerland where he was just to participate in the triduum liturgies which he knew as a kid and they still would have been of course in latin in those days and all that so he would have known that wherever he was in the world because he just wanted to bask in the in the beauty of the liturgy well benedictines know all about that and i think to make their monasteries oases of of beauty that'll have enormous evangelical import a lot of times when people think of the benedictines they think of prayer and work they think of benedictine spirituality they think of the beauty of chanting liturgy of the hours but it's sad to me that i'm not sure a lot of people would immediately connect benedictines with the intellectual life but you emphasized in your talk to the abbots that we're hemorrhaging young people from the church very often for intellectual reasons we know that from the surveys and so this is what you said in response and again i'm quoting you do most young people realize that benedictine abbeys were the places where quite literally the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved where western civilization was maintained did they know that without benedictine monks the intellectual heritage from which the university system and indeed the sciences emerged would not have survived uh how do we need to recover this benedictine intellectualism yeah i mean it's up to them i suppose and i just encourage them along those lines it's still a staggering truth to me and as he repeated my words to be there i was that's that sounds good i ever said that that was no i was struck by the truth of it it's simply the case isn't it whatever we know from the classical world think of all these texts think of what was lost i mean that's that's also interesting thing to reflect on how much was probably lost in the ancient world but whatever we've got we got it because patient benedictine monks over many many centuries long before the printing press laboriously copied out these texts the commitment to the intellectual life that was that was there from the beginning of monasticism and eventually flowered as the universities so now by the late 12th early 13th centuries when the universities were emerging that's unthinkable apart from benedictine houses and then take the next step out of those universities came the physical sciences as you and i have said many times you know and so the intellectual world in general not just the in the religious intellectual world i mean science and everything else owes an enormous debt of gratitude to benedictine monasteries as i say there how many of our young people even know that whatever sense that that these descendants now these daughter houses and granddaughter houses of these ancient places that's where it happened and so i told the abbots get your own monks your best and brightest monks and get them geared up get them doctorates and get them really into theology because years centuries ago it was monks copying out ancient texts and commenting on them i said now it's probably the internet and engaging young people with questions and uh carrying on the intellectual tradition in an evangelically indispensable way i said of course that should belong to to the benedictine community let's talk about two final principles of benedictine life that are evangelically powerful the next one is the importance of community it's almost become a cliche to observe that we live in a depressingly lonely society yet one of the most significant aspects of benedictine spirituality is an openness to not just community but especially receiving guests what can we learn from benedictines on this front well i think today i told the abbots this you know it's the oasis idea again they have that marvelous tradition and i benefited from it personally all over the world where i've been received in benedict and houses with great hospitality one of my great memories it was that it was at sito uh this classic ancient place and i was received there by the abbot and he washed my hands that's in the rule that's in the old rule that the guest's hand should be washed when he comes into the refectory i remember two that night i was finishing up my doctoral work i was there with a friend of mine a monk benedict from um saint anselm's abbey here in new hampshire and we were finishing our doctoral work and we were received there then the word came down to us from the abbot that he invited us to speak to the community about our respective doctoral uh dissertations and it's one of the great memories of my life is it was with some trepidation because it was of course all in french but going into this i think it was the refectory or some chapter room and all the monks of sito were there and here's the here's the descendants of saint bernard you know and i you know laid out the outline of my doctoral paper and my point there is is the hospitality with which i've been received all over the benedictine world has been a marvelous thing and i said to the abbots think of the young people that are are searching they're lost they're they're angry at the church whatever your outrage to them to let them participate for a time in your community as a daily visitor as a weekend visitor as a retreat and i said that can change someone's life and you should make these oases very available to people and i said think of me walking i was a seminarian about to be ordained but still i mean i'm 36 years later still profoundly moved by the memory of that experience so keep those benedictine arms wide open to receive guests well the final encouragement you gave the benedictine abbotts was to be masters of the spiritual life um here you shared your deep conviction that the armies of young people that have drifted into these weird syncretistic anti-anti-interest institutional forms of religion we we're just talking about strange rights that book which chronicles this exact phenomenon that many of these young people are starving for the real thing that's what they're hungering for but they need masters who will guide them how does benedictine spirituality help here in every way i told them you know it's of course pope benedict who takes his name from this great saint in this great tradition where he said look what what people want out of priests finally is is a master of the spiritual life so priests are a lot of things you know administrators and and we're evangelists and and we um we say the mass and we visit the sick and all those things but finally he said what people want they want to sense in you that you know what the spiritual life's about that you know how to guide people on the path to god and i said to the abbots look you've got the greatest tradition in the west of of spirituality centuries of some of the greatest spirits who know the path to god and how to draw people into it i said when the young people come to your monasteries that's what they want so when you welcome them and you bring them to the liturgy and you invite them to you know eat and drink with you and so on but realize what they're hungry for ultimately is call it spiritual direction that they they want to know the path to god i think here of a great benedictine like columbia marmion you know who's a 20th century master of the spiritual life all these dynamics that govern our journey into god our walk with christ and someone like marmian who draws on john of the cross and draws on the scripture and draws on aquinas but gifted a very high level of articulation young people want that they want the real thing and we shouldn't settle for well you're kind of a spiritual person you know keep seeking no no they want something nourishing and and the benedictines can give it to them um so don't set aside our own extraordinarily rich spiritual tradition but learn it and share it and propagate it [Music] [Music] well it's time now for a question from one of our listeners today we're hearing from ian all the way up in vancouver canada if you have a question for bishop baron you can send it in to us record it on any device at the website askbishopbearn.com today ian is asking about a personal practice in bishop baron's own home so here's the end hello bishop baron my name is ian kent and i am from vancouver bc canada i heard in one of your podcasts recently that you do your own dishes is that actually true because isn't there some guy like me hanging around saying here my bishop fan let me do your dishes let me serve you and if not how can i sign up for that good thank you for that question um yeah it is true um i live in in a house the the bottom floor is the are the offices for the region and i live up on the second floor and um father steve bruno who runs word on fire lives there with me um and i'm out and about a lot so i i'm traveling or i'm on the road or i'm now confirmation season i'm eating out a lot but during covet especially like like most people i was i was home much more often and father steve is a good cook and he makes not fancy but they're a good simple you know nutritious healthy meals and we kind of cut a deal that he would do the cooking because i don't know how to cook but i'll do the dishes and um i i like doing dishes and i i think i think i know why uh my life is kind of cerebral you know i'm i'm thinking and writing and speaking and preparing and you know i go to meetings and there's something about this simple kind of repetitious quality of doing the dishes you have to think about it very much um that i it just appeals to me and you get why in places like monasteries that kind of simple repetitive work fits in very well with a life of prayer and you know it's funny when you ask that question i'm reminded when i was a kid i didn't do dishes my mother did that when i was a kid but my job around the house growing up was cutting the grass and we had we had a big yard front yard and backyard so it took i don't know hour hour and 20 minutes to do it but i think what i liked about it you know it's outside so it's summertime you're cutting the grass um and it's it's very repetitive you know you kind of go around the out outside then you do the next row in go around and i'm not joking when i say this when i first started reading people like thomas merton and they're talking about contemplation i thought a lot about cutting the grass simple repetitive um gives you a lot of chance to sort of think and muse and or even even kind of turn your mind off i'm just doing this thing see something else will tend to surface when you turn the calculating cartesian mind off you shut that down something else tends to arise well i sounds over dramatic maybe but doing the dishes is similar to that for me it's simple kind of mindless repetitive work it involves your hands involves your body and it it allows the mind to kind of shut down and um for for deeper things to emerge so yeah i i do the dishes and i i kind of like it actually i don't know if i give you that job if you if you applied for it because i i think it's good for me in a lot of different ways but i do appreciate the offer well as we wrap up here i'd like to encourage everyone to check out our youtube channel and watch this new video we just released called the making of a catholic priest it's a new short film we have telling the story of father stephen gadberry uh you might know father gadberry because he's a fellow of the word on fire institute he's taught course in there but this film tells his really amazing journey to the priesthood bishop i know you've known father gadbery for years do you want to maybe say a word about him oh he's a great guy yeah he studied at the neck although i didn't know him at the knack he i was there twice and he was in between those times or after i forget but i met him through our word on fire connections and just a marvelous guy i mean he's got so much going on uh intellectually and spiritually but also physically he's a great fitness guy he was on the american ninja warriors i mean that's pretty high level attainment and uh marvelous balanced you know um very healthy human being and uh and a great a great man of the spirit so i'm a big admirer of him so again check out the new film it's called the making of a catholic priest especially consider showing it to some young men maybe you have sons grandsons nephews young guys at your parish send them a link to this video because i think they'd really enjoy it well thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 58,877

Keywords: bishop barron podcast, the word on fire show, word on fire, word on fire sow, st benedict, bishop barron, bishop robert barron, bishop barron show, brandon vogt, st benedict podcast, st benedict show, evangelization, new evangelization, catholic, catholicism, christian podcast, catholic podcast, christianity, saint benedict, word on fire institute, catholic content, catholic talk show

Id: wNr06P2HL_I

Length: 32min 14sec (1934 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2022